Thursday, April 23, 2015

'I’ve had several goes at ‘mindfulness’, the fake ‘wellness’ cult, ‘happiness’ and 'life coaches', and admit to feeling repulsed by most of this therapeutic
psychobabble. But my revulsion reached a new low today when I read that
Australian ‘wellness’ blogger, Belle Gibson, had lied about having terminal
cancer, to sell her blog and book. Belle is a foolish young girl that deserves
pity rather than scorn but many proponents of mindfulness, wellness and
happiness are playing a similar game. It’s a game I’ve seen time and time again
in HR. A book appears, training courses to become ‘practitioners’ pop up, then
an army of HR people get out there promising utopian increases in efficiency
and productivity on the back of their own self-propelled beliefs. The whole
thing becomes a marketing exercise that uses its own hot air to fuel itself.

Evidence

First an observation. I started to note the same case studies,
same quotes and same figures pop up everywhere. Sure enough, behind every HR
fad, there’s usually a book. In this case, it’s ‘Mindful Work: How Meditation
Is Changing Business from the Inside’ by David Gelles. So I bought it. Well, I
bought it but, let’s be clear, I didn’t ‘buy’ it.

His
evidence is largely anecdotal, mainly the testimonies of the execs who dabble a
little in meditation, like it and want to do a top-down job applying their
hobby to their employees. Even when workplace studies are considered they are
of such poor design that they’d make you weep.

The key
examples are, of course, companies who have the luxury of trying this stuff
out. Already, massively successful, cash-rich companies in tech, health
insurance and finance. Google, Aetna and Goldman Sachs - yes Goldman Sachs!
They used that bunch of thieving rats as an argument for increasing
‘compassion’? Have I entered an Orwellian universe where the crooks
define good behaviour? Hedge-fund managers are even quoted. Meditate in order
to rape the markets but feel good about yourself at the same time. Give me a
break.

Ultimately Gelles doesn’t answer the key question, that many
of these companies are in the game of making huge profits, avoiding tax. It’s
capitalism, not compassion that drives them. These therapeutic approaches in
the workplace are fundamentally about money, not mental health. "Militaries round the globe are
using it for their snipers,” says Gelles. Well that’s good to know. Feel calm
while you blow someone’s brains out.

Here’s a
thought experiment. Let’s suppose you run a factory or hours billable law firm
and you’re faced with a recommendation for a ‘Mindfulness’ programme, which was
recommended to me as 20 minutes a day. In a 40 hour week you’d have to
guarantee a 4.6 % increase in productivity just to break even. Note that in the
Gelles book, there is only one solitary example of this being used in a blue
collar environment. Are we being asked to believe that factories, shops,
rubbish collection, bar staff and dozens of other jobs will see these increases
in productivity through meditation? I think not.

When it
comes to the evidence, let’s be careful here and ask the usual questions. What
is the source? What was the method? There are far too many self-proclaimed,
surveymonkey theorists ready to promote something which they already make a
living from. As John Higgins (to be fair a supporter of wellness programmes)
says, the evidence for the impact of these programmes is never clear, as“those
who took advantage of the programs were likely individuals who already highly
driven, motivated, and oriented toward self-improvement”. I’d contend that this
has far more to do with the on-going obsession HR has with binary, therapeutic
and even Silicon Valley narratives, than science.

False binary narrative

While I’m not against attempts to make life less stressful
and the use of these techniques on a personal level or where medically
diagnosed, mental illness is the target, there is a dangerous line that is
crossed with mindfulness, wellness and happiness. That line is their injection
into the workplace. While these three mini-movements are different, they are
all part of the same broad pathological narrative. The language used betrays
the problem.

1. Mindful v mindless

Jay Cross says “Mindful
people are more creative and productive than their mindless peers. They feel
more content and fulfilled in their lives.” Bold claim but note the
juxtaposition of ‘mindful’ with ‘mindless’. Am I really less fulfilled in my
life than those who practice Mindfulness? Mindfulness becomes righteousness
when it dismisses the rest of us as falling short of its some self-proclaimed
cognitive and moral standard. For me, that’s where the line has been crossed.

2. Wellness v unwell (ill)

The same issue arises with wellness, where the assumption
is that we are unwell, namely ‘ill’, and need to be made ‘well’ by whatever
craze hits the HR conference circuit. Those who don’t take part in dancing to
the new company tune are branded as the unwell. Again. I resent this sport of
binary benchmarking.

3. Happiness v unhappiness

Lastly, with happiness we have the simplistic ‘unhappy’
versus ‘happy’ assumption. If you’re not being made happy, you are
dysfunctional and unhappy. Henry
Stewart challenges me by saying “But
would we really prefer a workplace where people are unhappy to one where they
are happy? Would we really create an unhealthy workplace to a healthy one?
Would we prefer a disengaged workforce to an engaged one?”

These are
precisely the false binary choices that these movements use to peddle one-sided
and therefore myopic solutions. It poses mutually exclusive language to
artificially bolster a case for the product (usually consultancy or a training
course). By all means make the workplace a better place but these
simple, binary oppositions in no way reflect the rich and complex mental states
of people at work. These programmes
assume simple dualisms and open HR up to ridicule. Treat people well, respect
them, make sure they're fairly rewarded, listen to what they have to say,
develop their skills but don't cross that line and become their pseudo-therapist.

Therapeutic
narrative

Another narrative that underlies all three is the
therapeutic narrative that goes back to Freud but includes many others,
especially Carl Rogers. This narrative lies deeper than the one above, as it
draws on a Freudian view of the world that sees almost everyone in need of
therapy. It has its origins in Europe but reached its apotheosis in the US and
California in particular. Carl Rogers is known as the founder of
'client-centred' therapy and his promotion of counselling. He also had a keen
interest in education and his therapy-oriented methods became widely adopted in
education and training through coaching and mentoring. His influence can be
felt everywhere in the learning world, especially through counselling and
therapeutic techniques in education and the workplace.

This narrative refuses to die and has morphed from fairly
benign mentoring to more intrusive counselling and now onto mindfulness,
wellness and happiness. Descriptive definitions suddenly become prescriptive
techniques to be applied to all. Just as the underlying Freudian theory fades
(almost nothing has survived) this narrative, the therapeutic narrative,
described well by Frank Furedi in Therapy Culture (2004) gets resurrected.
This, I believe is a line that should not be crossed. Employees are not patients
and the workplace is not an experimental therapy sandbox and HR are not
therapists.

Silicon valley
narrative

The third narrative behind all of this is the Californian,
Silicon Valley narrative. Jay Cross sees Chade as a missionary for compassion
and world peace. In fact, he’s a software engineer, turned trainer, who runs
meditation classes for, some would say, spoiled Google kids. Unfortunately, he
genuinely thinks he’s on a mission for world peace – pictures with the Dalai
Lama, Obama and so on. But isn’t it Chade who has lost a sense of proportion
here? A software engineer on the Google dollar, telling the rest of us how to
live our lives. Beware of geeks bearing gifts.

Let’s take
but one kooky example from Google world. A Googler, as reported by Jay Cross, says
that “60% of Google engineers suffer from
‘imposter syndrome”. First, I doubt that such a thing exists, and suspect
this is no more than the general self-doubt that almost everyone, except
sociopaths and psychopaths, have as a normal part of their mental make-up. It
is not a clinical disorder and is not mentioned in the ‘Diagnostic and
Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders’. The imposters here are those who pose this false imposter/real
dichotomy, then reinforce the need for therapy, to cure the mythical clinical
disorder, making us mindful, well or happy. They do this by calling it a
‘syndrome’. This is exactly the sort of pathological interpretation that
characterises normal features of the mind, as a ‘disease’. If there’s anything
wrong here, it’s the culture of hype and narcissism that exists in these
companies. So fixated are they with their own wellbeing that they lose
perspective on the problems of inequality that their companies help create. The
imposters here are the amateur clinicians and ‘me, me, me’ narcissists at
Google.

“I feel smart organizations should do everything they can to help workers
be happy, fulfilled, productive corporate citizens” says Jay Cross. This is
where I differ. I don’t want to become a ‘corporate citizen’. How about
‘Googlers’ becoming, not corporate citizens but real citizens by forcing their
rapacious employer to pay their taxes? This issue is being avoided and I won’t
be preached to by global behemoths, who have scant care for anyone, other than
their well-paid, mollycoddled employees.

Let’s be
clear about the scale of the problem. Rather than being obsessed about their
own mental fads, they should see what the billions of unpaid tax could do for
people with real mental illness. I’m talking about the mentally ill who are
often homeless in most major US cities and lack adequate funding elsewhere in
the world. People with real mental illness are marginalized, as are their
families, where social isolation and financial difficulties abound. Countries
struggle to create healthcare systems that cope with this problem. Think what
we could do for these people if the global, Silicon Valley organisations
decided to do their moral duty and pay the tax they owe? Digital
companies have been the most aggressive in tax evasion, using tax shelters to
hide billions from national tax regimes. This is downright evil. So bad are
Google that the OECD and UK tax clampdown has been called the ‘Google Tax’. Googlers and others – stop
meditating and pay your taxes.

Conclusion

I have no
problem with anyone choosing to partake in yoga, reflexology, mindfulness,
wellness, laughter therapy, happiness – whatever – but that is a lifestyle
choice, not a workplace imperative. This lifestyle stuff is something HR are
neither qualified nor suited to manage. One minute they hear a conference talk
on the subject, the next they are running the ‘course’ and claiming that it
will transform the business. Send them to a conference on clowns, and they’ll
recommend we all wear red noses and big shoes.

PS

For a light heareted critique of the 'happiness' craze - check out dailymash.

3 Comments:

Well of course I have a few points to make on this one, Donald, but it will take me a while to untangle your twisted arguments and parse it into something logical.

In the future, please attack one humanist business practice at a time.

Where do we differ, when we see eye-to-eye on so many things?

Maybe it's my paternalism, but if I know a practice (be it meditation or chanting or widgets or whatever) that boosts productivity and well being, and I didn't share it, I'd feel terribly guilty.

If 12 minutes of calisthenics boosts performance and teamwork significantly, I'm in favor of it, whether or not it's faddish. Ditto mindfulness, reflection, and centering. These are all individual choices: you can't force someone to get their act together.

I'm also in favor of repeating the Hawthorn Experiment, adjusting the lights and thermostats to show people you care. If it ups performance, everyone is happier.

Well, at least I put aruments together Jay. In this field it's all wishful thinking and marketing. A good start would be to address themyth that Google are a compassionate organisation. They consistently rip countries off on tax. The US thinks Goggle can do no wrong - the rest of the world disagrees.

Actually I'd rather you didn't repeat the Hawthorne Experiment if you're going to do it the way it was original undertaken.

"The “Hawthorne effect” draws its name from a landmark set of studies conducted at the Hawthorne plant in the 1920s. The data from the first and most influential of these studies, the “Illumination Experiment,” were never formally analyzed and were thought to have been destroyed. Our research has uncovered these data. Existing descriptions of supposedly remarkable data patterns prove to be entirely fictional."

"The illumination studies have been hailed as being among the most important social science experiments of all time, but an honest appraisal of this experiment reveals that the experimental design was not strong, the manner in which the studies were carried out was lacking, and the results were mixed at best. Perhaps fittingly, a meta-analysis of the research testing the enormous body of research into Hawthorne effects triggered by this initial study yields equally mixed results (Adair, Sharpe, and Hyunh 1989).

Perhaps the most important lesson to be learned from the original Hawthorne experiments is the power of a good story. The mythology surrounding the Hawthorne experiments arose largely absent careful data analysis, and has persisted for decades even in the face of strong evidence against it generated by Franke and Kaul (1978) and Jones (1992). While our research is probably no more likely than the previous papers to put an end to such myths, at a minimum it raises the costs of propagating these stories among those who are concerned with scientific accuracy."